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Naked Truths

In the non-fairy-tale world we actually live in, nobody pays much attention if some random urchin on a street corner starts shouting that a feared and lofty potentate isn’t wearing any clothes. But if the shouters are a pair of prestigious guardians of public rectitude and upholders of the ancient traditions of civic morality, then word that the emperor in question is not just buck naked but scrofulous and syphilitic just might begin to trickle down to the lower orders.

Such a duo of über-respectables are Thomas E. Mann, a luminary of the ever so slightly left-of-center Brookings Institution, and Norman J. Ornstein, an ornament of the somewhat more firmly right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, both of whom used to communicate in tones of calm, non-inflammatory reassurance. Such a street corner is the Washington Post, and such a potentate is—well, here’s the headline over Mann and Ornstein’s double-length op-ed, which landed on Georgetown stoops a few Sundays ago: LET’S JUST SAY IT: THE REPUBLICANS ARE THE PROBLEM.

Oh dear. How very impolite. A sample:

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

Elsewhere on this site, George Packer writes that while sentiments like these have been coming from some surprising quarters lately, “Mann and Ornstein are the unlikeliest polemicists of all.” Their Post piece was a bugle call for their new book, provocatively titled “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism.”

Naturally, Mann and Ornstein were in town the other day for a bit of book tourism. At a lunch sponsored by The Common Good, Patricia Duff’s floating political salon, Ornstein said that the nonpartisan reputations which he and Mann have earned over their long careers represent a store of capital, and that the Republican Party’s comprehensive lurch to the extreme right had persuaded them that “now is the time to spend that capital.” Both parties have become more ideologically uniform—more “parliamentary.” But they are not symmetrical. Moderation, a visible if not dominant tendency in the G.O.P. as late as the Bush père Administration, is now an almost exclusively Democratic phenomenon. Third-party fantasists like Tom Friedman and Matt Miller, pining for a Presidential candidate of centrist moderation, seem not to have noticed that we already have one—Barack Obama.

When it was Mann’s turn to speak, he remarked that it is no longer accurate to describe the Democrats as the liberal party and the Republicans as the conservative party. It’s closer to the truth to say that the Democrats are the conservative party and the Republicans the radical party.

“It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” is a cogent, concise, and, in its think-tanky way, passionate book. One of its strengths is that the authors go beyond simply (and quite persuasively) scolding the Republicans. They recognize that the G.O.P.’s “New Politics of Extremism” is enabled by “the American Constitutional System,” broadly understood. That system, unique in the advanced democratic world, is in many ways the dark side of American exceptionalism. What with the separation—atomization, really—of powers among an executive and two national legislatures, all three of them chosen independently of one another by different electorates on different schedules, all three required to agree for anything big to be accomplished, all three subject to the whims and diktats of a near-sovereign Supreme Court, and one, the Senate, helpless against the veto power of a filibustering minority or even the intransigence of a single member, public frustration is such that the wonder is that the kind of pseudo-populist plutocratic nihilism embodied in the twenty-first-century Republican Party took so long to fully emerge.

As Packer notes, the mostly modest “fixes” that Ornstein and Mann recommend

are reasonable and, in a few cases, novel, but they suffer from a problem of circularity: the very élites they call on to provide leadership in cleansing American politics are themselves too compromised, or simply no longer trusted by a jaded public, to play that role.

Some of their fixes are designed to compel “the parties” to look beyond their hard-core ideological bases by broadening voter participation via innovations like weekend voting, automatic registration, and (a clever if desperate idea) “a lottery—an election Powerball with a large prize, in which a person gets a ticket in exchange for a voting receipt.” The problem is that one of “the parties” is doing everything it can to narrow voter participation by disenfranchising members of groups demographically likely to prefer the other of “the parties.” Other Ornstein-Mann fixes, such as reining in the filibuster and limiting the political power of big money, would certainly be in the interest of accountable, coherent, and effective government based on democratic legitimacy. But when one party sees government itself as the enemy and sees accountable, etc., government as especially dangerous—and when that party can block change even when it is nominally out of power—the odds against even such small reforms are long.

The emperor has no clothes, and kudos to Ornstein and Mann for pointing it out. Unfortunately, the Republican solution is to turn the country into one big nudist camp.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.